Will ChatGPT replace search engines?

ChatGPT strikes fear into the hearts of professionals in every industry, from education and publishing to healthcare and big tech. Apparently, the bot is not only going to steal your work, but also put search engines and a variety of other technologies out of business.

Of course, few things in the tech industry are as overhyped as anything to do with artificial intelligence. Sensational headlines are easy to write, but is there any substance to the idea that ChatGPT is replacing Google and other search engines?

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT (or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is an AI chatbot system developed by OpenAI. More specifically, it is a question answering (QA) model that uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand human questions/commands and then generate answers from the information in its training dataset.

Recently, ChatGPT has received a lot of attention for its ability to provide clear, concise – and accurate – answers to questions of varying complexity.

The quality of its answers has led to comparisons with search engines and suggestions that it does a better job than the likes of Google. The question is increasingly being asked whether ChatGPT or future versions of the same technology will replace search engines.

Can ChatGPT replace search engines?

The speculation only increases when you have people like Paul Buchheit – the man who created Gmail – saying AI bots like ChatGPT will “displace” search engines within a year or two.

However,...